The invention relates to a method for the measurement of performance parameters of an ATM network and to a device for the implementation of the method.
It will be recalled that an ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) network enables the transmission of digital information at bit rates that could be very high. Indeed these bit rates could go up to 155 Mbits/s.
Transmission according to the ATM standard is done by the transfer of information blocks of constant length. The elementary quantity of information transmitted is 48 bytes. The block transmitted in ATM is called a cell and is identified by a 5-byte label called a header. The total length of a cell is therefore 53 bytes.
There is no system today that enables the measurement of the performance parameters of such a network and that, in particular, provides knowledge of the rate of erroneous cells, the rate of inserted cells and the rate of lost cells.